A short history of getting bored and building things.

Football, and a lot of books

Played since grade one: house team from grade three, school team from grade five, then Surat. Never got to play for Gujarat, and I still think about it.

I read everything, from Tintin, Asterix, Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle to encyclopedias about space. In grade seven I read Steve Jobs' biography. Then Musk, JRD Tata, Branson. I've wanted to build a company ever since, and tech felt like the place to do it.

Blockchain, through cartoon zombies

Engineering at the LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur. DSA never pulled me in. A technology that could rebuild finance and trust did.

I learned it through CryptoZombies (I've always liked learning from pictures), then Patrick Collins' videos. No blockchain company came to campus, so I went looking on my own.

The chef who wasn't hired

I'd always cooked with my mum. A restaurant near home had a "front desk" opening, and I assumed that meant the kitchen. It didn't, and they only hired chefs with a culinary degree.

So I offered to work a week for free; if they didn't like me, they could let me go. I joined the prep team, stayed two months, and got a raise.

Five weeks, then out

My first internship was building NFT marketplaces. Then more NFT marketplaces. It was repetitive, and it felt off. I left in under five weeks.

Then I read the Finternet paper (opens in a new tab) by Nandan Nilekani and the BIS, and it blew my mind. It raised a question I couldn't stop thinking about: if anyone can tokenise any asset, who checks the token is real? I built smart contracts that let the issuing authority attest its tokens.

A friend told me, over coffee, to show it to people who'd care. So I wrote to people across the Finternet ecosystem. Dhiway wrote back.

Bangalore, and 72 hours of AI

A six-month internship at Dhiway: tests for their blockchain, a middleware, a tamper-evident QR, experiments with Iroh, a crawler.

Then the Beckn Energetic Hackathon. None of us had built anything with AI. In three days we built an assistant that onboarded people to solar, a main agent routing to sub-agents over Beckn's APIs. We came second, just behind a team of AI engineers.

DeDi, and the startup life

I went full-time and got DeDi, the best product I've worked on. Frontend, backend, customer calls, support, docs: everything. It went live in India's energy stack, and I presented it with my CTO at an LF Decentralized Trust meetup (opens in a new tab).

Late nights, a lot of coffee, and the most I've ever learned. Lately that includes a local-first sync layer I can't talk about yet.

Then my agent forgot again

My coding agents got smarter every day, but only within a session. Whatever we'd figured out in session three was gone by session four, so I kept re-explaining the same decisions.

So I started building Reverie (opens in a new tab).